Taking Context Seriously: a Framework for Contextual Information in Digital Collections
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Taking Context Seriously: A Framework for Contextual Information in Digital Collections UNC SILS Technical Report 2007-04 October 18, 2007 Christopher A. Lee School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. Phone: 919-962-7024, Fax: 919-962-8071. Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT Future users of digital objects will likely have numerous tools for discovering preserved digital objects relevant to their interests, but making meaningful use and sense of the digital objects will also require contextual information. This paper provides an analysis of context, distinguishing three main ways in which that term has been used within the scholarly literature. I then discuss contextual information within digital collections. I present a framework for contextual information that is based on nine classes of contextual entities: object, agent, occurrence, purpose, time, place, form of expression, concept/abstraction, and relationship. The paper then discusses existing standards and guidance documents for encoding information related to the nine classes of contextual entities, and it concludes with a discussion of potential implications for descriptive practices through the lifecycle of digital objects. “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” - Eliel Saarinen (The Maturing Modern, 1956) “…if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.” - Douglas Adams (1980) 1. Introduction Numerous forms of expression and social interaction are taking place through digital media. Having access to traces of these expressions and interactions will be essential for future users to know about, appreciate and understand the details of our current lives. Future users will likely have numerous tools for discovering preserved digital objects that are relevant to their particular interests, but this does not mean that they will be able to make sense of the digital objects once they have them. Literature about the curation of digital collections frequently cites the importance of reflecting context or contextual information associated with digital objects.1 However, there has been relatively little detailed discussion of (1) what “contextual information” means and (2) how curators of digital collections might best create, capture, encode, manage and provide access to contextual information. This paper addresses both questions. It was written as part of the VidArch Project, which is investigating approaches for creating, capturing and preserving contextual information associated with digital video collections; consequently, many of my examples involve digital video. 2. What is Context? Broadly speaking, context is "the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea" (Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2005). Context is an inherently relational concept. It is always context of, about, or surrounding something, which I will call the target entity (TE). In relation to a given TE, the broadest formulation of context would be “everything else,” i.e. everything (states, objects, facts, relationships) in the universe that is not the TE. If one wanted to know the full context of an entity, one would need an omniscient awareness of all existence – as through the eyes of God, 1 For a recent formulation of this position, see Ross (2007). UNC SILS TR 2007-04 October 18, 2007 1 LaPlace’s demon, or someone inside the Total Perspective Vortex (Adams, 1980). Such a conception of context, however, would not be very useful, nor would it reflect the “thrownness” (Heidegger, 1996; Winograd & Flores, 1986), “embodiment” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Dourish, 2001), or “situatedness” (Lindblom & Ziemke, 2003) of the human condition – acting, thinking, learning, developing, caring and perceiving within, about and through a particular lived subset of existence – or the insights from psychology about figure-ground relationships, which imply that the meaning of a given state can depend dramatically on one’s particular focus of attention. A more human-centered version of the “everything else” definition might at least scale it back to “anything that is not defined as the phenomenon of interest” (Dervin, 1997). Glaser & Strauss (1964) offer a slightly more constrained notion of context as “a structural unit of an encompassing order” that is “larger than” and “surrounds and affects” the “unit under focus.” There are no absolute rules for determining a priori what will count as the context of a TE (Greenberg, 2001), but something is generally more likely to be considered part of the context if it is “proximate” (Guha & Lenat, 1994) to the TE along some particular dimension or for some particular purpose. In short, context is a set of things, factors or attributes that are related to a TE in important ways (e.g. operationally, semantically, conceptually, pragmatically) but are not so closely related to the TE that they are considered to be exclusively part of the TE itself. Within a particular conversation, discipline or school of thought, the boundary between (i.e. what should be considered part of) the following three categories is a matter of ongoing negotiation and evolution: (a) TE, (b) context of the TE, and (c) things not relevant enough to be considered part of either (a) or (b). Stated another way, the boundary between content and context is “pragmatic, permeable and revisable” (Callon & Law, 1989) and “is continually negotiated and re-negotiated” (Lea, O’Shea & Fung, 1995). Within research communities, these distinctions are often closely connected with decisions about units of analysis. Many social scientists, for example, have emphasized the need to attend to surrounding elements, in order to understand the TE, through units of analysis such as activity (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006), practice (Bourdieu, 1977), domain (Hjørland & Albrechtsen, 1995), situated action (Suchman, 1987), scene (Fillmore, 1977; Blum, 2003; Tyler & Evans, 2003), situation (Dervin, 1983), episode and setting. Across a variety of disciplines, specific formulations of context tend to emphasize one (or more) of the following: Context1 - the set of symbolic expressions or representations that surround a TE and help one to express, make sense of, translate or otherwise act upon or within it (e.g. the discourse within which a statement is embedded; other documents filed in the same category; formal theory within which a concept or statement is to be understood) Context2 - objective or socially constructed characteristics and conditions of the situation in which a TE is, appears or occurs (e.g. location; temperature; being under water; occurring as part of a traditional ritual2; position within the reporting structure of an organizational hierarchy; relative arrangement and orientation of objects; existence and accessibility of other surrounding objects3) Context3 - aspects of the mental or physical state, disposition, intentions, identity or recent experiences of an actor that bear upon how she interprets, understands, acts within, or what she notices of, the situation at hand. The first meaning of context (context1) is about a TE’s place within a larger discourse or information system. Contextual analysis – the analysis of surrounding text of a work in order to make sense of it – is an example of an activity that is based 4 on context1. The second (context2) is about the objective or inter-subjectively recognized set of factors surrounding a TE. The third (context3) is about the subjective status of a particular agent -- e.g. a user in context-sensitive computing, one ascribing knowledge to a statement in epistemology, a participant in a speech act. This type of context includes not only 2 An important aspect of context can be the culture in which a TE is embedded or enacted. As a set of shared patterns of behavior (social structure), culture is often best characterized as a form of context2. However, any culture worthy of the name will also manifest itself in various ways through context1 and context3. 3 To the extent that they serve as “representational artifacts” (Levy, 2001), surrounding objects can serve as both context2 and context1. The arrangement of documents relative to each other within a physical space (or experientially physical but digitally mediated space such as a computer file system or desktop) can constitute documentary context, but it can also shape habitual and embodied behavior in ways that do not involve direct symbolic processing (Malone, 1983; Kirsh, 2001; Sellen & Harper, 2002). 4 One formulation of the “context” of a statement is precisely that portion of context2 that is not reflected in context1. That is, context is “an abstraction of the features that are not explicitly included” in a model of the world (Edmonds, 1999). This type of context, by definition, will never be captured or preserved explicitly within an information system. UNC SILS TR 2007-04 October 18, 2007 2 “where I stand” and “what I’m currently thinking” but also what has been variously called fringe (James, 1890), horizon (Husserl, 1952; Heidegger, 1996; Gadamer, 1989), habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), or habits (Dewey, 1922) -- all of which emphasize and attempt to explain the intimate connections between agency and the world in which agents are embedded. In their discussion of multi-sensory communication, Mani & Sundaram (2007) break down context3 further as either context of construction or context of interpretation (context for the message transmitter or receiver, respectively). “Common ground” is shared context3 that allows two or more individuals to understand each other (Stalnaker, 1978; Clark, 1996). The confluence of contexts3 (e.g. through conversations or other interactions between individuals; or interaction between an individual and a document) can be characterized as a “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer, 1989). From the perspective of a given agent (A), context3 can take the form of (1) A’s own state, disposition, etc. or (2) the state, disposition, etc. of other agents that are 5 relevant to the matter at hand .